Dara Lind · Tuesday, January 31, 2017, 4:33 pm
Build a wall around public benefits, and make immigrants’ relatives pay for it.
President Donald Trump upended American immigration policy with three executive orders in his first week as president. He may not be done yet.
The Washington Post obtained two draft executive orders the Trump administration is reportedly considering, both of which (in title and content) resemble documents Vox wrote about and published last week.
One order deals with work visas; the other addresses social services for legal immigrants who are already in the United States. It’s an indication that the many immigration restrictions Trump has signed are not the full scope of what key advisers have discussed. The draft dealing with legal immigrants’ use of social services could have further-reaching implications for legal immigrants currently in the US than anything the president’s already signed.
Legal immigrants currently get access to some public benefits in some circumstances. But the federal government — already, under existing law — can bar someone from coming to the US, or from becoming a permanent resident, if there’s any evidence he or she will become a “public charge.”
Currently, the federal government looks at use of cash benefits (like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) when it’s making “public charge” decisions, but not in-kind benefits like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
This executive action, though — according to the draft obtained by Vox, which seems consistent with the Post’s reporting — would ask the Department of Homeland Security to issue a rule saying that an immigrant can’t be admitted to the US if he’s likely to get any benefit “determined in any way on the basis of income, resources, or financial need.”
People who use any of those benefits and are in the US on visas would be subject to deportation. And the order would even require the person who sponsored an immigrant into the US to reimburse the federal government for any benefits the immigrant used.
This is draconian. It seeks to punish not only legal immigrants in the US and their families, but their US-citizen relatives. It’s a reflection of a worldview in which any benefit that an immigrant gets from the government is, in some way, a theft of American tax money — and punishes immigrants as thieves accordingly.
Read more
http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/31/14457678/trump-order-immigrants-welfare
This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.
No comments:
Post a Comment